The establishment of the limited effects paradigm

1
The establishment of the limited effects
paradigm

• End of the powerful effects model of media
  influence

2
Powerful effects model

• During the period from the turn of the century
  till the mid-1940s, the predominant view of media
  effects was that the media had a powerful
  influence over their audiences and society.
  Media were able to tap into the audience members
  unconscious, stir his passions and get him to
  think and behave as the message source wished.
• Freudian psychology
• Mass society theory

3
Limited effects model

• Beginning in the mid-1940s and lasting until the
  mid-1960s a very different view of media effects
  came to prevailone that assigned a much more
  limited impact to the mass media
• The American Soldier
• Mr. Biggott studies
• The Peoples Choice and Voting
• Klappers Effects of Mass Communication

4
WWII American Soldier studies

• Part of a large-scale social science
  investigation of American soldiers recruited or
  drafted for service in WWII
• This part especially interested in the effects of
  Frank Capras propaganda films on the morale of
  new recruits/draftees
• Why We Fight
• Documentary explanation of the buildup to and
  early years of the war

5
Episodes taken from Why We Fight

• Prelude to War
• The Nazis Strike
• Divide and Conquer
• The Battle of Britain

6
Battle of Britain

• Men in two camps--some exposed to film, some not
• 2100 in one camp (before/after control group)
• 900 in another camp (before/after control group)
• 1200 (after-only control group)
• Sampling by company units
• Units matched on several demographic variables

7
Battle of Britain

• Before and after questionnaires were slightly
  different
• Tried to distract men from wondering why
  answering twice by writing revised on the
  questionnaire
• One week between exposure and after measure
• Anonymity was assured

8
Results

• The movies had a significant impact on factual
  knowledge
• Ex. Why werent the Germans successful at
  bombing British planes on the ground?
• Ans. because the British kept their planes
  scattered at the edge of the field
• Experimental group 78 correct
• Control group 21 correct

9
Results Learning from films
10
Results

• Opinions and interpretations
• Effects were not as great
• the heavy bombing attacks on Britain were an
  attempt by the Nazis to . . .
• Answer invade and conquer England
• Experimental group 58
• Control group 43

11
Results

• Effects on general attitudes were slight
• Do you feel that the British are doing all they
  can to help win the war?
• Experimental group 7 greater than control
• On several measures, only 2-3 positive
  difference was found

12
Results

• Strengthening the overall morale and motivation
  of viewers
• The series was ineffective
• Question concerning whether trainees would prefer
  military duty in the U.S. or overseas
• Experimental group 41 overseas
• Control group 38 overseas

13
Results

• Unconditional surrender by Nazis is an important
  war aim
• Experimental group 62
• Control group 60

14
Results

• 9 weeks after exposure
• Factual material was forgotten
• Retained only about 50 of factual items that
  1-week groups remembered
• On 1/3 of opinion issues, the long-term group
  showed less change
• However, on more than half of the fifteen issues
  under study, the long term group showed greater
  change than the short-term group
• Sleeper effect

15
Hovland et al.

• Set up Yale school research on persuasion
• Study the effect of
• Source characteristics
• Message characteristics
• Order of presentation
• Psychological characteristics of audience

16
Source characteristics

• Credibility
• Topic Atomic submarines
• Sources J. Robert Oppenheimer/Pravda
• Topic Future of Movie Theaters
• Sources Fortune magazine/A woman movie gossip
  columnist
• Greater persuasion with more credible source
• However, after 4 weeks difference had disappeared

17
Content

• Fear appeals
• The greater the fearfulness, the greater the
  effect on interest, tension
• The less fearful messages had a greater effect on
  intension to change behavior
• Fear appeals were thought to invoke some sort of
  interference

18
Message

• Fear appeals
• You might expect that an appeal based on fear has
  to be hard-hitting to be effective. However, a
  study conducted by Janis and Feshbach in 1954
  suggests that a minimal appeal is likely to be
  more effective. They used three different
  versions of a lecture on dental hygiene. The
  strong appeal provoked the most tension in the
  audience, but the greatest change in behavior in
  conformity with the message was produced by the
  minimal appeal to fear.
• This probably suggests that when people feel they
  can do nothing about the threat then they are not
  likely to change their behavior.

19
Channel

• The main study here tends to indicate that
  interpersonal channels are more effective at
  changing attitudes than are mass media channels.

20

• An excellent example of this is provided by
  Kendall and Woolf's analysis of reactions to
  anti-racist cartoons. The cartoons featured Mr
  Biggott whose absurdly racist ideas were intended
  to discredit bigotry. In fact 31 failed to
  recognise that Mr Biggott was racially prejudiced
  or that the cartoons were intended to be
  anti-racist (Kendall Wolff (1949) in Curran
  (1990)).

21

• Another study referred to by Curran was conducted
  by Hastorf and Cantril in 1954. Subjects were
  showed film of a particularly dirty football
  match between Princeton and Dartmouth and asked
  to log the number of infractions of the rules by
  either side. The Princeton students concluded
  that the Dartmouth players committed over twice
  as many fouls as their team. The Dartmouth
  students concluded that both sides were about
  equally at fault. The authors concluded that it
  is not accurate to say that different people have
  different attitudes to the same thing, as in
  fact, 'the thing is not the same for different
  people, whether the thing is a football game, a
  presidential candidate, communism or spinach.' As
  Curran suggests, it might be more accurate to say
  'believing is seeing' rather than 'seeing is
  believing'.

22
Audience factors

• Scouts who valued group membership highly were
  least influenced by speaker who criticized wood
  craft learning

23
Personality

• Personality variables such as self-esteem,
  anxiety and depression have an influence on
  persuasibility. Janis's research suggests that
  people with low self-esteem are likely to be
  relatively easily persuaded.

24
Overall conclusions

• Mass media are not as overwhelmingly persuasive
  as the propaganda theorists considered them
• Persuasive effectiveness varied by source of the
  message, format of the message, audience factors
  such as personality and channel of communication

25
Columbia School

• Paul Felix Lazarsfeld emigrated from Austria to
  the U.S. in the 1930s.
• A mathematician
• Interested in the application of mathematics,
  especially the new statistics, to study of social
  problems
• Set up research programs at Princeton (Radio
  Research Bureau) and at Columbia (Bureau of
  Applied Social Research) that combine study of
  practical problems with academic methods of
  research
• Some of his first studies focused on audience
  size, reactions to and use of radio programming

26
Features of the approach

• Interested in individual knowledge, attitudes and
  behavior resulting from exposure to media
  messages and campaigns
• Focus groups and/or surveys were the usual
  methods of study

27
The Peoples Choice

• Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet
• Study of 1940 election in Erie county, Ohio
• 20th Century--strong, commercially successful
  newspapers, radio, mags, that had ability to say
  what they wanted to in Western European countries

28
Research Questions

• 1. How do people decide to vote as they do?
• 2. What were the major influences on them?
• "Social characteristics determine political
  preference."

29

• Lazarsfeld could predict with 76 accuracy which
  candidate a person would vote for based on her
  demographics. That was better than the people
  themselves could predict.
• Prediction is taken as the criterion of validity
• "Cross-Pressures"
• Opinion Leaders (21)
• ("Have you tried to influence someone on a
  political issue recently?" "Has anyone asked
  your advice recently on a political issue?")
• opinion leaders were thought to be a rather small
  group of influential people
• Evidence of actual influence was lacking

30
Media influence

• Whenever a person in the sample changed his/her
  vote intention, the interviewer asked why
• Democrats mentioned radio most often (30 vs. 20
  for newspapers)
• Republicans mentioned newspapers (31 vs. 17 for
  radio).

31

• Over half the voters said the media had the most
  important impact, 2/3 said news media were
  helpful
• Two-step flow
• Conclusion--interpersonal communication most
  important

32

• Those most likely to be predisposed to vote
  Democratic were exposed to more pro-Democratic
  propaganda
• the analogous situation was true for Republicans
• Lazarsfeld decided this showed selective
  exposure--those who were predisposed to vote one
  way or another chose to expose themselves to
  propaganda that was positive toward the preferred
  party

33
When did they choose?

• 1/2 made up their minds before May
• Once they knew the nomination, another 1/4 made
  up their mind
• 1/4 made up their mind between nomination and
  election
• Columbia did another study in 1948, then got out
  of campaign studies
• Voting, by Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee

34

• Since 1940, predictive power has decreased--SES,
  ethnicity, religion have declined
• Issues may now be more important
• --television has come in

35

• Generalizability?
• a. particular presidential campaign
• b. not looking at nonvoters
• c. not looking at influences outside of campaign
  (nomination, etc.)
• d. formal education levels have increased since
  that time
• e. professionalization of campaigns

36
Katz and Lazarsfeld

• Personal influence The two-step flow of
  communication
• Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955)
• Decatur study of opinion leaders conducted by the
  Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia

37

• Assessing opinion leaders role in four areas of
  influence
• 1. marketing
• 2. fashion
• 3. public affairs
• 4. film choice
• Talked to women in Decatur about where they went
  to get advice on the topics
• Women acted as opinion leaders in a topic area
  depending on their position in the life cycle,
  SES, social contacts

38
Other research

• Prejudice studies
• Prejudiced and non-prejudiced individuals read
  anti-racist cartoons
• Information campaigns
• Cincinnati United Nations campaign
• Persuasion studies
• Political effects surveys

39
Klapper Five Generalizations

• 1. Mass communication ordinarily does not serve
  as a necessary and sufficient cause of audience
  effects, but rather functions among and through a
  nexus of mediating factors and influences.

40

• 2. These mediating factors are such that they
  typically render mass communication a
  contributory agent, but not the sole cause, in a
  process of reinforcing the existing conditions.

41

• 3. On such occasions as mass communication does
  function in the service of change, one of two
  conditions is likely to exist. Either
• a. the mediating factors will be found to be
  inoperative and the effect of the media will be
  found to be direct or
• b. the mediating factors, which normally favor
  reinforcement, will be found to be themselves
  impelling toward change.

42

• 4. There are certain residual situations in which
  mass communication seems to produce direct
  effects, or directly and of itself to serve
  certain psycho-physical functions.

43

• 5. The efficacy of mass communication, either as
  a contributory agent or as an agent of direct
  effect, is affected by various aspects of the
  media and communications themselves or of the
  communication situation (including, for example,
  aspects of textual organization, the nature of
  the source and medium, the existing climate of
  public opinion, and the like).

44
Selectivity

• Notions of selectivity are a movement away from
  notions of mass society. It reflects a more
  sophisticated understanding of social
  organization. These three levels of selectivity
  represent somewhat different levels of analysis
  which reflect the influence and development of
  the disciplines which contributed to the
  knowledge and development of mass communication
  research.
• this type of research contributed to the notion
  that the mass media have only limited effects
• because they were looking only at short-term
  effects
• reliance on experimental methodology